Yahoo's mobile chief: Acquisition spree about playing 'catch-up'

When Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer took Adam Cahan aside almost two years ago and asked him to start a new mobile division, he wasn't sure it was the right idea.

It's not that he disagreed with Mayer's plan to transform the desktop-centric Yahoo into a mobile company. But Cahan, who joined Yahoo just a year before its new CEO, says he wasn't convinced that having a mobile-specific group was the right way to go about that transformation.

"If mobile is going to be big, everybody should be focused on mobile," he said. "Why would we have an independent organization?"

Almost 40 acquisitions later, Cahan, a 42-year-old with salt-and-pepper hair, says he's now a believer in the mobile division. Since forming the unit in October 2012, Yahoo has refreshed most of the company's existing properties, including Weather, Finance and the photo-storing service Flickr, so they work well on smartphones and tablets.

Yahoo also added a new mobile product called News Digest, which takes the day's top news stories and boils them down to short summaries.

The goal is to lure users away from the rival services of formidable competitors like Google and Facebook, who have increasingly seen advertising dollars moving from desktop computers to smartphones and tablets.